The Void Mobile Game

Following my graduation from University I wanted to create a game and publish it. After debating the type of game I wanted to make for a while I opted on a infinite sidescroller set in a ongoing apocalyptic world. Programmatically speaking the game is pretty basic, but it allows me to learn new skills in terms of art, level design, and user experience design.

The Idea of "The Void" is that a infinitely sized entity is chasing the player from left to right, this entity is called the "Void" and is essentially a gigantic black wall of fog and mist. This void kills any living thing that it encompasses and therefore is the players ultimate objective to get away from.

To make this more of a interesting game, there is a slight twist on the standard endless runner genre. The player dosen't really get rewarded for the distance travelled and instead get all their reward from looting objects, killing enemies etc. These are inside buildings that the player must break into and search in order to get loot and money

This means that the player is in a constant state of questioning whether they should risk getting caught by the void or try to put more distance between them before trying to loot anything.

Ongoing project started October 1st

Features

Infinite World Generation, in both horizontal and vertical fashions
Lootable Objects of different rarities and values
Optimised approach to A* Graph Generation where only the immediate space around the player is scanned, AI also are not active the second they get out of this A* graph
Reusable Ad Manager that can be dropped into any project provided they have a Apple App Store ID or a Google Project ID
Reusable Save and Load System based on serialized data structures
Cloud Storage using Firebase
Dynamically Scaled UI to ensure good looking UI on all screen sizes
Inventory Systems for player weapons
Weapons can be upgraded for in game currencies
Player stat upgrades

Tweets

Started to work on a mobile game. Introducing "The Void" (WIP). A infinite runner where the player has to get away from a slow moving black fog called "The Void", however the player will get little reward for getting further away from the void \1
— Adam Harris (@AdamHarrisDev) September 24, 2022

A basic sample of one of the chunks created for the game

Screenshot of the inventory system

Player can hit lootable objects (Sink in this case) and find loot in them

Challenges

Optimisation: Due to limited processing power of some mobile devices a lot of consideration went into developing the AI and world generation systems so that it will not slow down the device as the player traverses the world

One of the solutions to the optimisation problem is that AI will only be active when they are inside a movable A* Grid that positions itself in a 40x40 space around the player.

To reduce A* graph generation slowdowns the A* graph is only generated when the player is over 10 units away from the place where the grid was last generated, this means that the graph generation has little to no constant performance impact

Collision testing: As this is a infinite world testing collision on all the chunks, AI, lootables etc generated will begin to take a performance toll when the player is far away from the start of the level

The solution to this is to disable the colliders of any object that collides with the "Void" this moving object goes from left to right and hits everything making it the ideal control object for deciding when to disable an objects collisions